SYSTEM OF OBJECTS, Le système des objets, 1968.
Baudrillard.
In this work, the author proposes to analyze from a systematic point of view, the relationship of men with the objects in a consumer society. This is a limited "rationality of the plan object" because the latter has a structure that is his and which shows certain function, which highlights a meaning independent of the use that can make the object. Accordingly, the author's analysis assumes the dimension of a "structural technology."
The question raised is how a system "technically coherent" ceases to be so particular? The response brings to light various aspects of the same reality: the system is on the one hand, functional and objective; we arrange the furniture according to a provision born of bourgeois convention, but which disappeared taste and theatricality; possession of a furniture produced in series and the technical field of the object are obviously abstraction of origins. Likewise, the "structure environment" creates an atmosphere functional, both the color reduced to simple calculations regarding the use of glass, ambiguous matter, on the border between the statement and its opposite. He is a man that is born of functional domestic world turned into spectacle, the myths attached to functional efficiency. This change marks the end of the symbolic dimension: the man is demoted to the contemplation of his own power, in fact, he becomes "dysfunctional."
Moreover, the system is also not functional and subjective: the modern object opposes the old, historic figure originated. In a society that disregards the past, the anachronism of the old mobile denotes a system failure, the last grade is the collection object, through which we collect ourselves. The system is also metafuncional (so dysfunctional): renewal of the objects decays in a stagnation against which the only remedies are the "electronics" and automation, the consumer becomes irresponsible (the "electronics" is "schizo-functional" ), there is risk of involution. Finally, the system is socioeconomic: the series based on ideology, which rejects the original, it feeds mainly on credit - which anticipates the enjoyment of the object and makes the consumer irresponsible - but also from advertising, which is uneven and frustrating and suggests reciprocity misleading. In conclusion, the author presents the consumer society as a manipulation plethora of signs, whose inconsistency as a system born of his own frustration it engenders.
Critical and uncompromising, Baudrillard is concerned to revisit the same sense of the social universe in the face of profound changes in the mental structures of its time.
Study: R. Hess, Dictionnaire des philosophes, PUF, 1984.
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